FYI, from gitter chat:
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I have been wondering the samething. When I saw the features I thought this looked awesome, but without updates and what not people start to disappear, so what good is a “Community Edition” if the community left already because it seemed like this was not going anywhere.
Also, what’s wrong with Unity? : P I have been using it since December and especially with the 2018.1 and newer updates coming soon, it is great. C# 7.3 support is currently there, but its still being worked on. I had an issue with it, but most said it was working fine for them with the new incremental compiler.
I answered a recent post here questioning where are the tutorials for this engine. That is probably the 2nd or 3rd time I’ve responded to such a post, which is apparently an understandable question for some prospective Xenko users to have - including myself. Unfortunately, I could not answer that poster’s question in any positive way, and I mostly said that not only are there no real tutorials for it at this time, but the way things are currently going there may never be. That was sad to have to say. There are a couple of potential rays of hope shining through the dark clouds right now, but not many, and they are not very bright rays.
I am interested in the upcoming update release. I will check it out, and be curious about any future news on Xenko’s development, or lack thereof, but I’ve had to stop trying to learn how to use Xenko for now. In my mind, it is already back on the shelf. I may dust it off some day in the future, if a few new chapters have been written for it, but otherwise I probably won’t take a second look back at it.
I’m kind of surprised there weren’t some decent tutorials for this engine put out by the developer earlier when Xenko was officially released, or even shortly thereafter. A lot of people don’t want to dive into trying to learn how to use a game engine without tutorials to help them along. So, in a lot of ways, I feel like this failure on Silicone Studio’s part helped doom the engine to mediocre interest on the part of potential early adopters of the engine - thus likely dooming its future.
Maybe the developers thought early adopters would end up doing all of the necessary legwork when it comes to putting out tutorials? If they did, I think that was very foolhardy on their part. Sure, any game engine that’s been out awhile and has a dedicated following will have many user developed tutorials for it. A new game engine can’t be pinning its hopes for survival on that quickly happening though, so it should be providing some of that material on their own at the outset of release.
Why didn’t they? Maybe they had already decided the engine wasn’t worth too much further effort, so why bother? I don’t know. I just feel they could have managed this engine much better than they have, and it frustrates me that they did not - other than the development work done on the engine itself, which seems pretty solid in my limited experience with it so far.
If I remember right, this engine was called “Paradox”, Silicon Studio bought them and re-branded ‘Xenko’.
It’s an interesting piece of software, if they don’t let it die as long as they don’t try to compete against Unity/Unreal/CryEngine it’s possible to find a niche market for it.
I don’t think they’d buy an engine just to watch it die on a corner.
You would think so, and I hope you are right. But, they may have not bought it for much, and may have not had to invest much further in it before releasing it, hoping it would take off a bit more than it has. There also may have been changes in management we are not aware of, with changes in priorities based on what is and isn’t making money, etc. We really don’t know.
All I know is that some things that I think would have made sense did not happen at all, things that do make sense have been taking a long time (to long?) to happen, and now the whole shebang’s future is up in the air. All of which is rather unnerving and does not sit well with me.
Everything could actually end up perfectly fine, or even better than had previously been the case. We just don’t know right now. I keep hoping for some good news of some sort, but I’m not seeing it yet - other than the update. That update is significant, but I also feel like Silicone Studio was mostly done with working on it anyway, so they may as well put it out, but it isn’t necessarily a strong sign of their future commitment to Xenko.
When they come out with the update, I am hopeful they will come out with some sort of statement that will help clarify the situation for all of us. If they don’t, that will just seem to me one more sign that Xenko’s future is still very much up in the air in Silicone Studio’s mind, and so where would that leave the rest of us?
The engine was started inside Silicon Studio, not bought from somewhere else. It even had the codename “Hotei” to follow our other products (named after some Japanese deities) but we then moved to more “international” names (Paradox then Xenko).
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Ah, okay, I had thought maybe that was the case, but I wasn’t too sure. Thank you for the clarification. That makes a pretty big difference, I think, in that one would think Silicone Studio would be more likely to stand behind a product they have created themselves. Or one would think so anyway. But, of course, now we are not so certain of that at this stage.
We are all eager to find out what is going on with further development of Xenko, but also very concerned about its future - which I don’t think can be helped much right now. That will remain the case while Silicone Studio keeps failing to communicate very well with the Xenko user community like it is now. This has been a concern. It really just hurts Xenko’s future as some current users stop using it and potential users decide to wait and see what happens while everything appears to be in limbo.
The fact that current Xenko users have voiced these concerns to Silicone Studio, and yet we are still not hearing much of anything in return, that just makes us all worry even more. Surely Silicone Studio can see that, yet we still hear little back from them. Maybe I am being a little too harsh on Silicone Studio? Perhaps this upcoming update will help mollify everyone’s concerns? I don’t think so though. We need to be hearing more back from Silicone Studio. I hope they make a clarifying announcement soon.
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Well…we are apparently fast approaching the release of Xenko’s much anticipated latest update, and it appears likely that an announcement regarding where Xenko is headed will be made by Silicone Studio at about the same time - or at least shortly thereafter.
For those interested, there is a great deal of discussion about this, GS bugs, working with shaders, and a great many other things Xenko related at the Silicone Studio/xenko community on Glitter. It was there that I noticed an announcement git.xenko.com is now back up. There is also a XenkoToolkit available on GitHub that may be of interest to some. (The XenkoToolKit is a .NET Standard library for use with the Xenko Game Engine. It’s goal being to add extra extensions and utilities to make using Xenko a bit easier.)
The developers of Xenko themselves are apparently still quite gung ho about the engine, and really hate how a great many Xenko users have been alienated by what has been going on over the last several months. The developers want to keep moving Xenko forward, but this feeling is apparently not in full alignment with Silicone Studio’s vision and strategy as a business.
An announcement on that future by Silicone Studio is still in the works, with no real details to go on for now. There are plenty of rumors, but most of that is just guesswork on the part of (understandably) frustrated Xenko end users. I count myself among those frustrated users, but I’m still hopeful that an announcement from Silicone Studio on Xenko’s planned future will help provide some much needed clarity for all of us.
Well this was a disappointing read!
I have been using Unity for 10 years now and was on the fence between switching to Unreal (and having to learn C++) or to Xenko (which is not complete yet).
90% of my being told me “Use Xenko”… and now it sounds like doing so might be a bad idea. Well that sucks 
The release of Xenko’s latest update has again been pushed back by at least another week or so. There is still no further announcement from Silicone Studio regarding further details on their changes to Xenko’s licensing plans. So, in the meantime, I’ve been looking at using other game engines for my current project that is still in its infancy.
Among the alternatives, I’ve been checking into possibly using the Godot game engine, since its version 3.0 (with much better 3D render support) has been out several months now, and the important 3.1 update should be out shortly. It is open source (MIT license) with an active, thriving and growing community. It is pretty well documented, and its community has done a pretty good job of putting out a variety of useful tutorials.
You can use C# with it now as of version 3.0, as well as several other programing languages, though work on being able to do that has not really been fully completed. I would probably just use their own GDScript, which is a high level, dynamically typed programing language that people seem to enjoy using a lot. It is apparently rather like Python, but much more oriented to being used for game programing. Being a relative newbie, I would be okay with that, but people well versed in using C# might not be.
While admittedly off subject, but not entirely, does anyone here have any opinions regarding using Godot as an alternative to Xenko at this time?
While admittedly off subject, but not entirely, does anyone here have any opinions regarding using Godot as an alternative to Xenko at this time?
I was looking at Godot before trying Xenko. Godot is great but is behind Xenko as of now, especially when it comes to c#. Godot is like 6 months away from really fixing their C#, its a mess right now. BUT Godot has a future for sure. Development is strong and improvements are coming faster than ever. If Xenko keeps the slow updates there is a decent chance Godot will catch up in the next year or two and surpass Xenko. That plus being open source means Godot is a safe bet.
Unfortunately, I think I’m going to have to go with the safe bet.
Maybe they are just super busy with working on new features?
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What, still no news from Xenko? Nothing on the supposed update release that is supposed to come out any moment now, but keeps being delayed by weeks and now months?
C’mon Xenko, please, let us know what the heck is going on, man.
Last ETA I got is that it should be before end of this month.
But as usual, it’s outside of my control so take it with a grain of salt.
Note: I am currently not part of Silicon Studio anymore, so until contract/legal/NDA stuff clear out, I am not allowed to say much, even though it is frustrating. The only thing I can do is wait with you guys…
Wait is over… Xenko is now completely opensource under permissive MIT license (editor+runtime).
It will be managed as a community project.
Please see full announcement there: https://xenko.com/blog/xenko-opensource-mit/
Sorry for the long wait!
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Wow. That’s great news!
If losing backing by a big company is great news to you, then sure.
New Management all the things. Not really a loss when good content becomes opensource.
that’s a bit short sighted. since xenko is open source we are confident to make a big budget project in a very short time with it because we can fix all problems that may arise on our own by compiling xenko, which was not possible before.
we actually do this every day and it has already produced 4 pull requests on github from which everyone will benefit. so, i’d say for the users its a big advantage.
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Actually, maybe you’re right. Silicon Studio didn’t have proper management for the Xenko project anyway. So there’s hardly any loss.
Maybe your company/team can become the new backbone.
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